


Helpmusic for Lovers

by kateyboosh



Category: Nathan Barley (TV)
Genre: Because it's kiss kiss week, Happy Ending, In which I revive a draft for Kady, It'll be worth it for the, M/M, Sorry about the writer's block there Dan, Writing about writer's block: way better than having writer's block, kiss kiss
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 11:02:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29900124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kateyboosh/pseuds/kateyboosh
Summary: Dan has writer's block, and Jones isn't helping.Until he is.
Relationships: Dan Ashcroft/Jones
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6
Collections: Trash Triplets Present (to our own surprise): The Completely Spontaneous Kiss Kiss Week Collection





	Helpmusic for Lovers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kdqt314 (kdobrole5)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kdobrole5/gifts).



> Remember when I said I had a Dan/Jones idea that was old as the hills that I probably wouldn't write? Kady sent me a prompt on Tumblr for Completely Spontaneous Kiss Kiss Week requesting a Dan/Jones kiss to Venus in Furs, and I _absolutely_ had to write it then. Thanks, Kady! This pairing has been so refreshing to write.

Two thousand words. 

Two thousand words on a three-day deadline, a grand and a half in cash if he can get it in on two.

Dan cracks his knuckles and taps his space bar. 

Used to be, on a good day, he'd pop out for a smoke, knock back a cup of steaming hot tea, sit in front of his laptop, and wake up from his miniature fugue state right around lunchtime. Two thousand words would be staring him in the face. After a sandwich, a couple bags of crisps, and fiddling with the commas, he'd turn in his piece and stroll out of the office flush with cash. For a few days, at least. 

Today, he's had his smoke and his cuppa and he's sat in front of his laptop, but the only thing glaring back at him is the snow-white expanse of a blank document. 

The tiny clock at the corner of his screen clicks another minute down.

He hasn't even got a title yet. 

Fuck. 

Another smoke takes him five minutes, and a wander down to the cafe for a second cup of tea takes him twenty. He figures half an hour to reset and refresh himself, and he'll get back to the flat, sit down at his desk, and get a thousand words out by mid-afternoon. 

Except, when he gets back, his desk is a massive fucking mess, one full of moldy takeaway containers and cigarette butts and crumpled-up notices marked "overdue" in threatening red letters. It looks and smells like someone's emptied a skip over the top, and then, as an afterthought, cleared one spot for his laptop.

Which has gone stone dead, since he left it unplugged, and the battery's been loose since he dropped it down the flight of stairs leaving the office, and. Yeah. This is great. 

Dan squeezes his fingers into fists, snaps the fucking thing shut, and stomps down the hall to the front room. 

His charger isn't in the knot of cables in his bag, or kicked under the sofa, or under the carpet, or hiding behind the door to the kitchen. He's about ready to start opening the cupboards to rummage around behind the cereal boxes when he spots the tail of the charger peeking out from the loaded power strip that rests to the side of Jones's decks.

He yanks it out of the strip, flings his laptop onto the sofa, and plugs the charger into the wall. 

He nods when he comes up about three feet short. 

The only extension cord in the flat seems to have done a runner, too, because it's neon fucking bright green and he could see it from space without a telescope on a good day. But, it's not behind the sofa, or behind the magical cable Narnia of Jones's decks, and Dan laughs to himself, because it's not behind the cereal boxes in the cupboards either.

Five hundred words by nightfall, and he won't need to put every last piece of furniture in sight in a pile in the middle of the front room and set it on fire.

Dan drags a chair out of the kitchen, plugs his laptop back into the strip, and rests it gingerly on the spare space at the side of Jones's decks. There's just enough room for him to be able to type, although he has to lift his wrists up to avoid upsetting the balance. 

Not that he has to worry about that, anyway, because in order to type, he'd have to have a fucking clue about what he needs to be writing about, and what the hell he's supposed to come up with on "the parallels of modern man to the primordial ooze via parrots, clowns, and performance art installations in the greater London area," well, he hasn't got the foggiest.

The flat door slams. 

Dan jumps and almost loses his laptop. He catches it before the battery pops out and clicks it shut as Jones saunters into the front room.

Dan has to bite back a laugh. Parrots, clowns, and performance art installations in or outside of the greater London area haven't got shit on this kid. He's wearing two belts, neon yellow and bright pink, along with several layers of black and blue fishnet shirts. Neither of the belts are through the loops of his red drainpipes, which have about six fiddly buttons down the center instead of a zip.

Not that Dan's ever looked long enough to have counted or anything. He just notices things like this. He's a writer, he's got an eye for detail-

"Alright, Dan?" Jones beams.

_No. Busy. On deadline._

"No. Busy-"

"Could you make us a cuppa if you ain't too busy?" He scrapes a hand through his hair and it prickles up in a spiky hedgehog path. "Only I been up all night, out at that - well, down the club, but _awake_ all night, and maybe the night before, too? Christ, I'm tired. Is it Tuesday today or Thursday?"

He's wobbly in his boots, swaying across the floor with a case of records clutched to his chest. He blinks three times, comically big cartoon blinks like he's been dazed by an anvil dropped on his head, and Dan reaches for the case before he drops that and breaks a toe instead.

One more cig, one more cup of tea, and then he'll get three hundred words in before bed or before fucking dawn, whichever comes first.

*

Jones parks himself and stares at the trail of crumbs leading away from the sugar bowl as if he's afraid they'll animate into something with legs and chase him round the rickety table. He leaves Dan to get the mugs and the milk and the teabags. He's slumped over in his seat, wilted like a colorful tropical bird in a snowstorm when Dan turns back with hot water.

Since they met, as they've orbited around each other, Dan's realized that he and Jones have more in common than he first thought. Jones might seem loud and in your face - and he is - but he’s not one of the capital I Idiots. He cares about the noises that he makes, like Dan cares about the words he puts down, even if some of the topics he covers are nauseating. 

Dan can’t call what Jones makes "music." Not yet, anyway. He does make funny noises in his sleep, though, snuffles that Dan could picture him recording and mixing into a track, a counterpoint to the textured screams and pitched hums and static he layers in. 

Dan nudges Jones awake before he drops into a full-on snore, and he gives Dan a confused look, eyes sliding between Dan's face and the teacup.

Dan helps him out. "Here. It's tea. You wanted it, remember?"

He picks Jones's limp arm up by the wrist and wraps his hand around the cup. 

The warmth perks Jones up. He sucks down half the cup in one go, gets enough in him to murmur an absentminded thanks to Dan, then migrates over to the cupboards. Dan watches him do a round while he smokes, opening drawers, poking past expired boxes and dusty cans. He ends up back at the start, woozily crunching at stale Coco Pops. 

It's weird how quiet it is in the room, compared to the usual hum of noise Jones gives off. 

Dan can feel something in the flat shift. 

He breathes deep. 

He can do three hundred words after this. He's got his space to work. He can bullshit something for a start, fake it til he makes it. He can find some asinine connection between performance art and primordial ooze, or he'll make one up, and by next week, every trendy fuckhead within the city limits will be regurgitating his prose like it's gospel. Jones can pass out on the sofa and sleep for a day, and that'll give him enough time to get this godforsaken assignment done. Grand and a half'll buy him a brand new laptop that won't spazz out any time he looks at it funny, or moves it, or tries to type on it. 

He can do this. He cracks his knuckles, stubs out his cigarette, drains his cup. Three hundred words is nothing. In fact, he can and will do three hundred in an hour, then go for takeaway, then come back for three hundred fucking more.

Jones wanders past him then, one hand scraping through his hair, the other clutching the cereal box to his chest, a massive eye-level erection straining against the buttons at his fly.

_Oh._

He's not quick enough to avert his eyes. Jones chooses that moment to turn back into- well, into Jones. He grins wide around a mouthful of Coco Pops, smile stretching to the corners of his mouth, eyes darting down away from Dan's face to the stretched front of his jeans. Then, he swallows. He shrugs. 

Not bothered.

"Didn’t notice, really. Your body does well weird shit after you’ve been up a couple days,” he says, completely unselfconscious, as if he's talking to Dan about the weather. He goes back to eating handfuls of sugary cereal straight from the box, wandering over to the fridge to start the kitchen exploration cycle again.

Dan blinks. Really, he has to agree, remembering fuzzy excerpts of times when he didn’t go to bed for a few days, insomnia combining with writing and working to pace back and forth across his brain, twisting the dimensions of reality and physical space. 

Yeah, your body does do well weird shit after you’ve been up for a couple days. Still, Dan’s glad he’s sitting down, tucked under the table as Jones walks back by, smelling like a confusing mix of candy floss and sweat. 

Dan’s only been up for a couple of hours and his body’s already doing well weird things.

*

Chair. Decks. Laptop. Word processor. 

Parrots.

The green parakeets that zip around London have got to have some bullshit link to performance art. Even if they don't, they're about to. All he needs are ten good words. Ten good, solid words, followed by one thousand nine hundred ninety more.

Dan takes a breath.

_Hendrix set his guitar ablaze. Hendrix set his parakeets loose._

And he's off to the races. 

He flexes his fingers above the keyboard.

Off.

To.

The.

Races.

Dan's cursor _blink, blink, blink, blinks_ , and it's like fucking silent water torture, a faucet left on to drip, except Dan's got audible accompaniment now.

The sugary cereal and tea and tiny bit of chat seems to have unlocked something in Jones. Instead of shuffling off to sleep when Dan sat down to start, Jones is perched next to him, and now, he's started talking. 

Incessantly. 

Without seeming to need to draw breath.

It's been going on for half an hour, and somewhat hysterically, Dan wonders if Jones sucked all of the words out of him through osmosis, when he handed Jones the tea.

Dan stares him down. Jones doesn't seem to notice. He's stuck into a recap of his night or nights at whatever hole in the wall club he played last. It's seemingly a minute-by-minute recap.

"- so, then his mate, yeah? Big bloke, tiny eyes, bit of a mess, really. Bad shoes, _awful_ cargo shorts, pockets _everywhere_ -"

Jones cuts himself off from his ramble to pull a face that could bend a butter knife in half, and for a moment, Dan has hope that he's losing steam, that such a powerful expression is going to knock the life right out of him and send him back into a snooze.

"Wasn't all bad, though. Pretty fit. In a dad sort of way?"

Dan shakes his head. No. No more. No more mates, no more clubs, no more drinks or fit dads, and no more surprise fucking erections in his face. 

No more of anything except clowns and ooze and typing down any words he can get to stick. 

Dan turns up the volume on his laptop, pulls up Limewire, and hits his trackpad hard enough to dent it. What comes out is hypnotic and erotic and surely, it has to be enough to stop the talking and lull Jones to sleep. 

_Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather_

It doesn't stop Jones from talking.

Fine. 

Dan turns the volume up louder. His shit speakers buzz and make Lou sound like he's underwater, in some fucking swamp, but it just adds to the quirky jabs of viola stabbing through the drone.

Jones doesn't stop. He talks louder. 

Dan goes for the volume again, and a red speaker symbol pops onto his screen. He tries to dismiss it, clicks once, twice, three times...

And his laptop screen goes black.

_I am tired, I am weary_

_I could sleep for a thousand years_

_A thousand dreams that would awake me_

_Different colors-_

Fucking hell.

He jabs at the power button, wiggles the charger, reconnects the cable. Nothing.

Jones stops talking, then. He taps Dan on the shoulder. 

"Dan?"

"What?" he snaps.

"Think you might've gave it a virus there."

Dan shuts his eyes. He scrapes his chair back and stands. 

He needs to get out of this room, out of this flat, out of this city, this country. Out. He just needs out. 

Except he's broke, his passport's shoved somewhere in the rubbish heap on top of his desk, and yep. If he wants out, he needs the cash, and the article's the only way to get the cash, and the fucking kitchen's going to have to do for his escape. 

Maybe he can take his laptop. Maybe it'll work if he unplugs the coffeemaker and perches on the countertop to write, emulates one of those pricks using standing desks at the _Weekend on Sunday_ office.

Worth a shot.

He's in the tiny hall space between front room and kitchen when he hears the click of Jones's boots behind him. 

"Dan? Are you listenin' to what I'm-"

Dan stops short, and Jones collides with him, straight into his back like they're doing some slapstick comedy routine. His laptop thunks to the floor, and that's it.

Dan pins Jones to the wall.

"Stop," Dan hisses. "Just stop already."

Jones's face is red, and Dan realizes he’s slightly cutting off his air, but mostly Jones is hard and straining to get at Dan as a result.

Dan considers that they could never do this in a public place. Someone would hear Jones immediately, the little whimpery noise that he makes jolting into Dan like a bolt of electricity. Jones is the opposite of Dan: communicative, not afraid to say he likes something, not afraid to ask for what he wants or to show appreciation. He's loud, and nothing's going to hold him back from enjoyment. 

Then Dan wonders why he’s considering this in the first place.

And then, he leans forward, lets go of Jones's chest, and crushes their lips together. 

**Author's Note:**

> Smut chapter upcoming :)


End file.
